Family Melittidae

(3 subfamilies, 3 tribes, 14 genera, 164 species)

This family consists of just 164 species of morphologically diverse, short-tongued bees (Michener 1981, 2000). Members of this family are distributed in the temperate regions of the northern Hemisphere and in Africa. Melittids are absent from Australia and the Neotropics. The center of diversity appears to be southern Africa, where all three subfamilies occur together (Dasypodainae, Melittinae, Meganomiinae). Females have a well developed tibial scopa, lack facial foveae, and are exclusively solitary, ground-nesting bees. Most species show narrow host-plant preferences, as in Andrenidae. There are no cleptoparasitic groups known. Monophyly of the family is only weakly supported (Michener 2000 lists three characters which in combination unite the melittid subfamilies) and Alexander & Michener (1995) divided the group into three families (corresponding to traditionally recognized subfamilies). Our preliminary molecular data shows melittids to be polyphyletic, although phylogenetic analyses based on the single copy nuclear gene opsin (Ascher et al. 2001) recovers melittid monophyly. Our (very preliminary) molecular data do not support a sister-group relationship between Melittidae and LT bees, as suggested by Alexander & Michener (1995).

Kim Steiner at the California Academy of Sciences is working on developing molecular data sets for the melittid bees.

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Data sets:

none published